There aren't many philosophers or
philosophical schools that are regularly mentioned in the sports sections of
the daily newspapers. The Stoics, however, keep making it. Winning teams
calmly defending their narrow lead, or losing contestants maintaining their
dignity, are often characterised as acting stoically. How did the Stoa,
a philosophical school founded by Zeno of Citium some 2300 years ago, come to
leave such lasting terminological traces in ordinary language? Who were the
original Stoics? What were their views, and how have these views been
transformed on their long journey from 300 B.C. Athens to contemporary
philosophical discourse and beyond?

Anybody interested in these
questions may want to have a look at the Cambridge Companion to the Stoics,
edited by Brad Inwood (University of Toronto). I thoroughly recommend this
book to anybody with an interest in Stoicism, its history, and its legacy. Cambridge
Companions to Philosophy make up a series of volumes that contain a number
of scholarly essays by different contributors centered on the work of an author
or a school. The series is based on the assumption that even difficult writers
can be made accessible to non-experts without didactic simplification, if only
the contributors know their stuff, write clearly and avoid technical
terminology. Given these criteria, this Companion to the Stoics is an
unqualified success.

The volume contains fifteen
essays by the leading scholars in the field, each of whomdiscusses
one carefully selected aspect of Stoicism. None of these discussions is
chatty, obscure or irrelevant, and a brief glance at the contemporary research
literature confirms that the editor indeed managed to commission essays from
the world's leading experts. Taken together, the fifteen essays provide a
comprehensive overview on every aspect of Stoic thinking both within and
outside the bounds of modern philosophy. Taken separately they make great
guides to whatever corner of the Stoa one may possibly wish guidance to.

The volume opens with the story of
the school in Athens (David Sedley) and its successors during the Imperial
Roman period (Christopher Gill). Then we hear about the Stoics' epistemology
(R.J. Hankinson), their contribution to logic (Susanne Bobzien), their natural
philosophy, theology and metaphysics (Michael White, Kempe Algra, Jacques Brunschwig),
and their much discussed stance on ethics, psychology and freedom of the will
(Malcolm Schofield, Tad Brennan, Dorothea Frede). The Companion further
addresses the relation between philosophical Stoicism and medicine on the one
hand, and astronomy on the other (Hankinson; Alexander Jones), and it highlights
the Stoic contribution to the traditional grammar, as taught for centuries
throughout medieval and modern Europe (David Blank & Catherine Atherton).
The book closes with two pieces on the Stoic legacy (T.H. Irwin, A.A. Long), a
useful bibliography, a list of primary works and two indexes.

The form of this book -- a
carefully edited volume containing self-contained scholarly treatises -- fits
its content particularly well. Firstly we get a good feel for the scarcity of
sources documenting the thought of the early and middle Stoa. In contrast to
Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the famous Stoic thinkers of the
Imperial Roman age who left completed texts (mainly on ethics), we have only
scraps of the early Stoics. It is inspiring to see what, and how much, each of
the contributors to this volume gets out of the very limited amount of ancient
source materials. Secondly we get to witness the process of translation and
interpretation from various angles. Because the contributors always state
which Greek term they translate, it is illuminating rather than confusing to
see how the same Greek words get translated differently, depending on context
and interpretive interests.

Inwood's Companion does not
only illustrate how different authors working on a number of subject areas deal
with a limited amount of sources, but also how what is thought to be an
essentially coherent philosophical system can be approached from many different
directions. The Stoics conceived of themselves, and were so treated by others,
as highly systematic thinkers. The reader of this Companion discovers
this systematicity after just two or three chapters, which reliably link to
thematically related articles in the same volume, as well as to additional
literature. The main Stoic contributions to traditional grammar, for example,
were made in the context of their analysis of the properties of rational
thought (in the 'dialectical' part of their logic). The resulting grammatical
theory thus has strong ties to logic, and connects with wider issues within
epistemology, psychology, and even metaphysics (since sounds and words are
material objects). Stoic psychology in turn has its point in accounting for
the good life and is consequently deeply rooted in moral psychology.
Psychology must be understood in the context of Stoic ethics and the task of
living a good life. Because the good life is lived not only in accordance with
human nature, but also with the cosmos generally, it must be determined in the
context of both moral psychology and cosmology. And because the cosmos partly
depends on the will of the Gods, we cannot do without theology. Stoicism, as
A.A. Long puts it, "is coherent through and through -- a system such that
to remove one letter would be to destroy the whole account".

The interconnections between
rationality, morality and psychological health that the Stoic system pursues
may be of particular interest to the psychologically and philosophically
interested readers of Metapsychology Online. The Stoic assimilation of
moral goodness to agreement with nature encourages an understanding of
psychological sanity in terms of themorally
good. As Tad Brennan puts it, "the perfectly representative human psyche
belongs to the perfectly ethical human agent. Violations of ethical standards
always reflect lapses in psychological hygiene" (p. 259). Stoic
psychology is answerable to ethics. What it is to be mentally healthy cannot
be determined independently of an account of moral goodness, which makes use of
virtues such as wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. Stoic moral
psychology tells us that we ought to live consistently (i.e. each with her or
his own self), that we ought to be guided by the virtues in all circumstances,
and that we must not value worldly things in themselves (e.g., wealth, one's
life, one's reputation).

This brings us back to the
contemporary English use of the term 'stoical'. Many actions or attitudes that
we tend to characterize as 'stoical' today would probably have been approved of
by the Stoics themselves, because they held that emotions like fear, desire, or
pleasure are all based on false judgments. To fear something, for example, is
explained as a wrong belief that some future thing is evil; to desire something
is to value some future thing as good, and to feel pleasure is to wrongly hold
a present thing to be good (Brennan, p. 270). According to Stoic wisdom is
rational and moral to avoid pretty much all emotions except the joy we feel
when we act according to virtue. Given the Stoic fusioning of rationality,
morals, and mental health, this opens the prospect of moral underpinnings of a
prescriptive account of emotions and desires. What we describe as
'stoical' is to some extent what the Stoics prescribed as rational and
moral.

The Companion leaves us not
only with a good impression of, and furthered interests in, the Stoics
themselves, but also with the systematic question of whether Stoic ethics and
moral psychology can be separated from their theological and cosmological
commitments. If they can, they have a good deal to teach us moderns about the
role of reason, emotion and virtue in human life.

Dominique Kuenzle is a PhD
candidate at the University of Sheffield. He works on pragmatist accounts
of conceptual content and is interested in rational, discursive and epistemic normativity,
its 'continental' critics and rationalist defenses.

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